1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to automatic classification systems, and more particularly to automatic classification of customers.
2. Related Art
Many credit card issuers provide different types of credit cards. Each different type of credit card may include offers and incentives which are designed to meet the needs of specific types of customers. For example, a first credit card may offer cash back on consumer purchases, such as gasoline and groceries. This first credit card may be designed to meet the needs of consumers in that a consumer could benefit from cash back on consumer purchases. As another example, a second credit card may offer airline miles for each credit card transaction, and may allow the credit card holder to authorize multiple users. This second credit card may be designed to meet the needs of small business owners in that a small business owner could use the airline miles for business travel, and the small business owner could authorize her employees to use the credit card.
A credit card issuer that offers credit cards directed to specific types of customers could more effectively meet the needs of its customers if it could determine whether a customer is a consumer or a business user. Although a customer may be a small business owner, she may not be aware of the advantages available to her by having a credit card that is designed to meet the needs of a small business owner. If the credit card issuer could determine that this customer was a small business owner, then the credit card issuer could present targeted marketing advertisements to this customer illustrating the comparative advantages of having a credit card designed to meet the needs of small business owners, for example.
A typical method for classifying customers is to perform a manual inspection of all records of charges by the customers. Such a manual inspection method is time consuming, subjective, and error prone. A credit card issuer may have a large number of customers (e.g., hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers, or some other large number of customers). Classifying such a large number of customers manually would be prohibitively time consuming, and would lead to different classifications of customers depending on who performed the manual inspection.
Given the foregoing, what is needed is a method and computer program product for automatically identifying and classifying customers. Such a method and computer program product should allow a credit card issuer to provide improved services, incentives, offers, and rewards to a customer based on whether the customer is a consumer or a business user. In addition, such a method and computer program product should allow the credit card issuer to assess the comparative risk associated with extending credit to a customer based on whether the customer is a consumer or a business user.